Menu

Tag Archives: export

Over the weekend I opened up a WordPress importer for Micro.blog-hosted sites. Now that Micro.blog can serve as your primary web site — with personal domain name, short and long posts, themes, and pages — some users may want to consolidate their older WordPress blogs to Micro.blog. I’ve just finished a round of testing and bug fixes with a couple sites, including the 2000+ posts on my 15-year-old WordPress blog.

Micro.blog has always had great support for WordPress. If you host on WordPress and want to bring your posts into the Micro.blog timeline, all you have to do is add the WordPress RSS feed. This new importer is for people who want to migrate their whole site to be hosted by Micro.blog, not just mirror posts to the timeline with RSS and continue to use WordPress for hosting.

To access the importer on the web, click on Account → Edit Domains & Design → Import. It will prompt for a WXR file, which you can export from your WordPress site under WP Admin → Tools → Export. WXR stands for “WordPress eXtended RSS”, which is an RSS file with some extra WordPress metadata.

It’s important to note that the WXR contains post text, but not file uploads. To solve this, Micro.blog parses the HTML for all your posts, looking for img tags. It then downloads those referenced photos and adds them to your Micro.blog-hosted site. For this reason, it’s important that you keep your old WordPress site online until the import has finished. (The importer does not currently support WordPress photo galleries.)

If you try the importer, I’d love to hear what you think. And of course you can add a new Micro.blog-hosted site for just $5/month under the “New…” menu.

Shutting down a web site correctly isn’t easy. When Talkshow announced they were closing, I was surprised. Six months is a limited time to launch, get traction, and then wind down. But I was glad that they’d let any show be exported as an archive.

The archives aren’t available for very long. If you hosted a show on Talkshow, you have until December 1st to download it.

I downloaded a couple to see how Talkshow handled it. Just in case no one else grabs them, I’m copying them here: Pop Life episode 5 with Anil Dash and guest John Gruber, and the Six Colors live coverage for Apple’s September 7th event. I had Instapaper-ed both of these to read later anyway.

The archive itself is a simple .zip file with HTML, CSS, and user profile images. In the Finder it looks like this:

This self-contained structure makes it very easy to re-share somewhere else. Credit to Talkshow for keeping this simple. But it also strikes me as so easy to keep hosting as static files, I wonder why Talkshow doesn’t keep the archives available indefinitely, which would preserve any existing links to these shows from the web.

I’ve been making Watermark better. Sometimes it’s small tweaks or bug fixes; other times, more noticeable new features. Because it’s a subscription, I’m determined to improve it quickly and often. I don’t write about most of these changes, but the new Dropbox sync in Watermark deserves special attention.

Watermark originally shipped without any kind of export feature. This was a glaring omission for an archiving tool. But because of the large number of tweets stored by Watermark — some users have hundreds of thousands of tweets from their friends in the app — a simple export wasn’t feasible. I could have offered an export of just your own tweets, but then you also have the fairly clunky step of waiting for the server to gather tweets together, then downloading a file from your web browser, finding where to store it or the previous downloaded copy to replace it with.

Dropbox sync fixes that. Watermark can now automatically copy tweets (and App.net posts) from your saved filters and custom collections to CSV files on Dropbox. For example, search Watermark for “iPhone 5”, click “Save as filter”, and the most recent 1000 tweets matching that query will appear in a file called “iPhone_5.csv” on Dropbox. It keeps running in the background, so the files are updated every hour as new tweets matching the search are downloaded by Watermark, even if you aren’t signed in.

Now that I’m done “giving away a free iPhone”:http://twitter.com/manton/status/3370506213, I can move on to the next phase of my marketing plan: release new and better software! Crazy, huh? Clipstart 1.2 is nearly ready and I’m very proud of this release. There’s so much new stuff I could have called it 2.0.

Batch export. Select multiple videos and convert them to H.264, or optimized for iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV, and optionally run a script on the results. It can even create an HTML 5 web site and export in Ogg Theora format for Firefox and Opera users.

Twitter upload. Works with Yfrog to upload a video and post to Twitter. To include a custom tweet, use the “Upload with Options” command, just as you would add a description to a Flickr, Vimeo, or YouTube upload.

New tagging interface. Easy way to tag multiple videos from the keyboard. You can also now drag videos to an existing tag to apply that tag to the selection.

iSight capture. I wasn’t planning on adding this until later, but I think it complements the Twitter support well. Capture from the iSight and it records as H.264 and adds the video to your Clipstart library.

New toolbar and button style. I shouldn’t have used the round rectangle scope button style in Clipstart 1.0, so I decided to roll my own that fit well with the toolbar. It’s still not a standard toolbar but I hope to transition to one in a future version of Clipstart.

Change date for multiple videos. You can update the date for multiple videos at once, with the flexibility of changing specific portions of the date, such as just the year or month. Great for correcting dates from cameras.

AppleScript support. Just the basics for now, but you can get a list of videos, with tags and other metadata for each.

Plus some other fixes and Snow Leopard compatibility. I plan to release it in the next couple days, just in case Snow Leopard is released on the 28th as rumored. If you are interested in trying a beta and submitting some last-minute feedback, drop me an email at “support@riverfold.com”:support@riverfold.com.

I’ve been using “Ta-da List”:http://www.tadalist.com/ for the last couple of years for all my to-do lists. I have about 100 lists and love the speed of adding new items and some of the subtle smarts it applies to sorting recent lists and cleaning up completed ones.

But I’ve been on the lookout for a desktop app. OmniOutliner has become a bit bloated and all the Getting Things Done apps seem so structured. Along comes “TaskPaper”:http://hogbaysoftware.com/projects/taskpaper today and there’s a lot to like. The plain text file format is refreshing and nicely open.

I wrote a Ruby script to export all my lists from Ta-da into TaskPaper so that I can give it a proper workout. It makes a new document (with a single project) for each list it finds. Make sure to install “Hpricot”:http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/ first — there’s no official Ta-da List API so we need to parse HTML a little.